README.md

Mastodon is a free, open-source social network server based on ActivityPub. Follow friends and discover new ones. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All servers of Mastodon are interoperable as a federated network, i.e. users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one. This includes non-Mastodon software that also implements ActivityPub!

Features

It doesn't have to be Mastodon, whatever implements ActivityPub is part of the social network! Learn more

Real-time, chronological timeline updates

See the updates of people you're following appear in real-time in the UI via WebSockets. There's a firehose view as well!

Media attachments like images and short videos

Upload and view images and WebM/MP4 videos attached to the updates. Videos with no audio track are treated like GIFs; normal videos are looped - like vines!

Safety and moderation tools

Private posts, locked accounts, phrase filtering, muting, blocking and all sorts of other features, along with a reporting and moderation system. Learn more

OAuth2 and a straightforward REST API

Mastodon acts as an OAuth2 provider so 3rd party apps can use the REST and Streaming APIs, resulting in a rich app ecosystem with a lot of choice!

Deployment

Tech stack:

Ruby on Rails powers the REST API and other web pages

React.js and Redux are used for the dynamic parts of the interface

Node.js powers the streaming API

Requirements:

PostgreSQL 9.5+

Redis

Ruby 2.4+

Node.js 8+

The repository includes deployment configurations for Docker and docker-compose, but also a few specific platforms like Heroku, Scalingo, and Nanobox. The stand-alone installation guide is available in the documentation.

A Vagrant configuration is included for development purposes.

Contributing

Mastodon is free, open source software licensed under AGPLv3.

You can open issues for bugs you've found or features you think are missing. You can also submit pull requests to this repository, or submit translations using Weblate. To get started, take a look at CONTRIBUTING.md. If your contributions are accepted into Mastodon, you can request to be paid through our OpenCollective.

IRC channel: #mastodon on irc.freenode.net

License

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Affero General Public License for more details.